The Cueva Blanca style

The Tulán trading centre collapsed around 2720-2320 cal BP and soon after permanent and bracelets-permanent residential nuclei multiplied across the region (Sinclaire 2004; Agüero 2005; Núñez 2005). Small settlements of circular compounds grouped together occupied both the ravines and the oases, including the Loa River and its upper basin. Smallscale agriculture was adopted, but as in previous ages the dominant modes of subsistence were clearly the gathering of algarrobo and other fruit, the hunting of wild animals and the raising of domesticated camelids. Evidence of rock art during this time is limited, but there is a set of pictorial works called the Cueva Blanca style that introduced a new visual form. In this style camelids disappear almost entirely and human figures predominate (Figure 7). They are shown in frontal mode but lack movement, and geometric designs are much more prevalent, particularly wavy, zig-zag and criss-crossed lines. In terms of colour, red is predominant, though we also find combinations of two or more colours including green, black and/or yellow. From a compositional perspective, this art tends to be characterised by orthogonality, mirror symmetry and translation, and the images are frequently framed by a line drawn round them (Sinclaire 1997; González 2005).

Such works are relatively numerous along the Salado River and a number of them have been recorded in other localities in the region (Núñez et al. 1997; Gallardo 2001; Berenguer 2004). This art represents a radical change over previous works and is directly related to the introduction of a new visual culture never before recorded: images from textile tapestry, a technique that could have derived from the Bolivian Altiplano in association with the Pukara culture (Sinclaire 1997). This is the style known as cufflinks Ramirez (in allusion to the type site of the Azapa Valley in Chile's far north), the iconography of which spread extensively northward of the Loa River beginning in the middle of the first millennium BC (Rivera 1991) (Figure 8).

The expansion of this style in the Atacama region was not limited to textile- related visual devices and rock art; the Alto Ramirez burial mounds - in some cases similar in srructure and in others similar in form - have been recorded in different localities from the coast inland (Núñez 1971; Le Paige 1974; Moragas 1 982; Agüero étal. 2006). Considering that in previous periods the hegemonic nucleus was located south of the Atacameña region, it is not unreasonable to suggest that there was a geographic inversion in the hub of interaction and its relative influence over internal social relations of the region. This gains special significance when we consider that during that time the monumental town of Guatacondo was built, some 70km from the locale of Miño at the source of the Loa and Quillagua rivers in the lower reaches. This settlement had a large central plaza with more than 180 circular compounds grouped rogether around it. In relative size it was six times larger than the largesr contemporary Atacameña villages (Meighan 1980). Four other residential sites have been identified in the same valley, all with an archaeological design similar to that observed in the region under study. However, this community's prestige in social earrings is not so much the result of the circumstances enumerated above, but instead due to its role in an emerging technology: copper metallurgy (Graffam et al. 1996). This activity enabled the production of the metal sheets and tubular beads that have been found in Atacameña area sites and that also could have been used in the manufacture of tree cutting and woodworking instruments, which were used to build houses and make artefacts and accesories (Mayer 1986).